Many people in the world have disabilities that make it difficult or impossible for them to control aspects of their physical living environment in the same ways that ordinary people can. For example, a disabled person may not easily be able to control various living environment devices, such as clocks, phones, beds, televisions, doors, lights, elevators, VCRs, DVD players, digital video recorders, CD players, cable television boxes, tape players, stereo systems, satellite television boxes, radios, fans, thermostats, doors, windows, microwave ovens, and others. To address this need, assistive devices, referred to herein for purposes of explanation as Environmental Control Units (“ECUs”), have been developed. An increasing number of people rely on ECUs to control aspects of their living environment on a day to day basis.
It is sometimes desirable to be able to maintain and/or configure one or more ECUs from a location different from that in which the ECUs are deployed. For example, a hospital, nursing home, or other temporary or permanent living facility for disabled persons may need to be able to conveniently change the overall operation of ECUs that are located in different living environments, such as rooms, and/or beds within rooms, etc., such that they conform with the living environments in which they are located, and/or with new or different ECU users. Additionally, it may also be desirable to be able to have the ability to monitor or change specific operational characteristics within a remote ECU from an administration system, especially for the purpose of troubleshooting problems with the ECU. Such functionality has been lacking in existing ECUs, since they have typically required that configuration be performed on a single ECU basis, through configuration interfaces that are local to the ECU. As a result, system administrators and ECU maintenance providers have had to physically visit the room in which a given ECU is located in order to change its configuration or troubleshoot a problem with the ECU's operation. These requirements have been cumbersome and inconvenient, since ECU specific reconfiguration may be required whenever a new ECU user moves into a room, or when a new living environment device is added to a room. Moreover, when a problem occurs with the operation of existing ECUs, troubleshooting can only be accomplished by going to the room in which the ECU is located, in order to access the local user interface of the ECU. The difficulty of having to go to the location of an ECU to perform troubleshooting or maintenance through a local interface to the ECU is further complicated when the ECU is located in a private residence, which may be miles from the system support provider.
For the above reasons and others, it would be desirable to have a new system for managing an ECU that allows multiple ECUs to be conveniently configured by a remote administrator user over a network, and that also allows effective remote access to specific configuration characteristics of individual ECUs.